Composer Plays the Big Blues

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Composer Plays the Big Blues

The IBM 1401's essential stats: 25,000 multiplications per minute, up to 4,000 positions of core storage, and quite the accomplished singer. Just ask Jóhann Jóhannsson, an Icelandic composer whose latest work, IBM 1401, a User's Manual, is a requiem for this Model T of data-processing systems. Before the 1401 was retired, Jóhannsson's father, the machine's chief maintenance engineer in Iceland, managed to coax electromagnetic waves from its ferrite core memory by placing a radio receiver close by. The 1401 emitted a cello-like tone, which the engineers learned to modulate by giving specific sets of instructions to the memory. "It was supposed to be used in banks to calculate payrolls," Jóhannsson explains, "but they programmed quite complex Bach tunes and fugues. They taught it to sing."

You'll have to overclock the volume to hear those mainframe melodies in Jóhannsson's homage, which combines organ and string arrangements with music that his father recorded from the 1401 at its farewell ceremony in 1971. From those tones, Jóhannsson built A User's Manual into an epic five-part suite that's both John Barry film score and neoclassical experiment. "I was interested in the emotions evoked by the machine," he says, "and these programmers paying their last respects."